Restless spirit

If you’re an author with a family ghost, it would seem almost obligatory to write about it. Hannah Nordhaus’ “paternal grandfather’s maternal grandmother,” Julia -Staab, haunts La Posada hotel in Santa Fe (or so lots of people believe). In American Ghost, Nordhaus offers a fascinating and nuanced account of her ancestral ghost story and her complicated clan.

Daring women from the past

During the Southern Festival of Books, Karen Abbot was able to sit down and chat with us about her latest book, Liar, Temptress, Solider, Spy, which details the lives of four women who bucked societal convention, risked their lives and became spies during the Civil War.

Working undercover in plain sight

You can get away with quite a lot if no one takes you very seriously. Like carrying military intelligence about the Union army through enemy lines to deliver it to the Confederates. Or hiding Union POW escapees in your attic while Confederate officers are boarding downstairs at your home.

Facing personal danger for a mission of mercy

It is far easier to be morally outraged by a situation than morally engaged in confronting it. We look back at the horrors of slavery or the Holocaust and exclaim, “How could they have let this happen,” even as we effectively ignore the current waves of human miseries washing around our feet. Gil and Eleanor Kraus were no such antiseptic moralists.

Feature by Pat Broeske

Fifty years after gunshots rang out in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, the collective memory continues to celebrate the life and achievements of John F. Kennedy, and to ponder his death. Authors and publishers are also remembering the November 22nd anniversary with dozens of new books on Kennedy’s assassination and legacy. We’ve pored through the stacks to point readers toward some of...

The journey to become one nation

Some readers may not feel the United States today is quite the unum that Simon Winchester declares it to be in his engaging and informative The Men Who United the States. But after living in many places around the world and traveling extensively in the United States, the English-born Winchester became a U.S. citizen on Independence Day 2011, so he should be allowed a sparkler-flare or two of...

The surprising insiders of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance produced art, literature and music that tried to reflect the diversity of black experience. A persistent influence, though one mostly ignored by history, was that of white women. Acting as patrons of the arts, creating work under racially ambiguous pseudonyms or promoting interracial marriage, white women were very much a part of the scene. With Miss Anne in Harlem,...

A pivotal era in American history

When John Quincy Adams died in 1848, much of the nation was in the midst of exuberance and exultation. For many people it was a time of great optimism, for reasons including the discovery of gold in California and the establishment of the new Free Soil political party. At the same time, there was also greed, violence and a refusal by many to consider a solution to the nation’s most...

A look at the causes of World War I

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, there was no outpouring of collective grief. The archduke was not charismatic, had few friends and was selected as heir only because the emperor’s son had committed suicide. How could his death have led to a war into which the major world...